Andrew Marvell

Abstract

Andrew Marvell (b. 1621–d. 1678) is today one of the best known of English 17th-century poets, his poems frequently anthologized and studied in school and university syllabi. He was born on 31 March 1621 at Winestead-in-Holderness, fourteen miles southeast of Kingston-upon-Hull. Marvell’s family moved to Hull three years later when his father, a Church of England minister, was appointed master of the Charterhouse, an almshouse for the poor just north of Hull’s town walls. Marvell attended Hull Grammar School between 1629 and 1633, leaving for Trinity College, Cambridge, in December 1633 and traveling in mainland Europe throughout the civil war years in the 1640s. Marvell’s Yorkshire connections later led him to Nun Appleton, near York, where in 1650–1652 he worked as tutor to the daughter of Thomas, Lord Fairfax, the former general of the New Model Army. He also tutored William Dutton, ward of Oliver Cromwell, and worked as a civil servant in Cromwell’s Protectorate government, assisting the poet, John Milton, in Milton’s work at the post of Latin Secretary. In 1659, Marvell was elected a Member of Parliament for Hull, a post he held until his sudden death in August 1678 of a fever he had contracted on a visit to Hull “about the Towns affaires.” Marvell’s poetry has not always been as well received as it is today. Few poems were published in his lifetime, and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries he was better known as a political controversialist, the author of several prose pamphlets attacking establishment figures in church and state in the 1670s. T. S. Eliot’s influential essay, published in 1921, marked the rise of Marvell’s reputation as a metaphysical poet, but it also had the effect of sidelining Marvell’s political writings and parliamentary career. Recent scholarship has helped assemble a clearer picture of Marvell’s life and times, and a fuller understanding of his complex political and religious views has also helped forge better links between Marvell’s poetry and his political writings. Recent years have seen the publication of new biographies and new editions of Marvell’s complete poems and prose, helping new generations of students and scholars assemble a complete picture of this most complex of 17th-century writers.